There isn’t a material on the planet which is loathed quite as much as plastic. But the loathing has been overdone.

The amazing thing is that politicians insist on ignoring their own experts.

In 2005, the Scottish Government reported that the manufacture of paper bags consumes four times more water than the manufacture of plastic bags. (Water is, of course, one of the most valuable and scarcest commodities on the planet.)

And a 2011 UK Environmental Agency study found that paper bags contribute three times more to global warming than plastic bags. The change from plastic bags to paper bags will require seven times as many trucks to deliver the bags. All that diesel and all that pollution!

Pity no one told the Prime Minister.

In January of 2018 the widely loathed and distrusted Mrs May warned that plastic was ‘one of the greatest environmental scourges of our time’.

Since then her Government has continued the demonization of plastic and today every sanctimonious body in the country is busy telling the world that they are saving the planet by banning plastic straws.